Puzzle is one of the most crowded categories on the App Store, and "sudoku" alone returns a wall of apps from studios with real marketing budgets. If your plan is to rank first for a head term, the plan is wrong. But keyword work still matters enormously for a small game, because it decides whether you show up at all in the long tail — the specific, low-competition searches where an indie title can genuinely be the best result.
This is the process, without the parts that get sold as secrets.
Know which fields are actually indexed
The biggest waste of indie effort is optimising text the store doesn't read. On the Apple App Store, the fields that feed search are roughly:
- App name — 30 characters. The heaviest weighted field by a distance.
- Subtitle — 30 characters. Second heaviest, and visible to humans.
- Keyword field — 100 characters, comma-separated, invisible to users.
- In-app purchase display names — indexed, and routinely ignored.
- Developer name and category assignment.
The long description is not indexed for search on the App Store. This trips up anyone who learned ASO on Google Play, where the description very much is. On iOS the description's job is conversion, not discovery — different task, different writing.
Don't waste the 100 characters
Three rules recover a surprising amount of space:
- No spaces after commas.
puzzle,logic,brainnotpuzzle, logic, brain. Spaces cost characters and buy nothing. - Don't repeat words already in your name or subtitle. They're already indexed.
- Don't include your category name, "app", "game", "free", or your own app's name. All wasted.
The store combines your individual keywords into phrases, so you generally list single words and let it build the combinations rather than spending characters on multi-word phrases yourself.
Build the candidate list from real language
Before touching a tool, write down how actual people describe what your game is. Three cheap sources:
- Store autocomplete. Type the obvious head term into App Store search and read the suggestions. That list is generated from real query volume — it's the most honest free data you have.
- Competitor reviews. Not competitor keyword fields — their reviews. Players describe games in words the marketing never uses: "relaxing", "no ads", "colorblind", "offline", "for my mom". Those are the terms with intent behind them.
- Your own support email. How people describe your game when asking a question is exactly how they'd search for it.
For a colour-based sudoku, that exercise turns up a very different list than "sudoku": colour puzzle, color blind friendly, no numbers, logic grid, relaxing puzzle, offline puzzle, brain training, daily puzzle. Those are the searches where a small game can win.
Score candidates on two axes, honestly
Every keyword gets two rough judgements: how much traffic and how hard to rank. Paid ASO tools estimate both; they are estimates, not measurements, and the cheap ones are frequently wrong. You can get most of the value by hand:
- Search the term. Count how many of the top ten results are large, polished, well-reviewed apps. Eight or more means don't bother.
- Check whether the top results are actually about that term. If "color puzzle" returns mostly generic match-3 games, the term is under-served and a game genuinely about colour puzzles has an argument to make.
- Prefer three-word tails you can plausibly own over one-word heads you can't.
A useful heuristic for a first release: your name and subtitle should target the terms you want to be known for, and your keyword field should be almost entirely long-tail. Head terms in the keyword field are a lottery ticket; tails are a strategy.
Write the name and subtitle for both audiences
The name and subtitle are the only two fields that have to work for search algorithms and humans scrolling a results list. Keyword-stuffed names — the ones that read like Puzzle Game: Sudoku Logic Brain Number Free — do rank, and they also signal "low-quality clone" to exactly the players who'd otherwise pay for your game.
The compromise that works: a real name, then a subtitle that is a plain-English sentence containing your two most valuable terms. Something a person would say out loud, that happens to contain the words you want indexed.
Localisation is the biggest free win
Each localisation you add comes with its own name, subtitle and keyword field. Because the store indexes several English-language locales — and because many non-English storefronts see a meaningful volume of English-language searches — adding localisations is the closest thing to free keyword space that exists.
You don't need a full translation of the game to do this. Localised store metadata is a separate, much smaller job, and for a puzzle game with minimal text the translation burden is genuinely low. This is the single highest-leverage ASO task most indie studios skip.
Change one thing at a time, and wait
Keyword changes require an app update, so you can't iterate daily even if you wanted to. That constraint is useful — it forces the discipline that every other channel lacks.
A workable rhythm: change the keyword field or the subtitle in a release, never both. Wait at least two weeks for indexing and for volume to accumulate. Then compare impressions and product-page views from App Store search — the source-level breakdown in App Store Connect analytics — rather than downloads, which are contaminated by everything else you did that month.
If a change did nothing, it did nothing. Revert it and try a different tail. Most keyword experiments fail, and that's fine — the ones that work tend to work persistently, which is what makes the whole exercise worth doing.
What actually moves the needle, ranked
- Conversion rate on your product page. The store rewards listings that convert. Better screenshots beat better keywords, consistently.
- Ratings volume and recency. Ask for ratings at a moment of success — right after a completed puzzle, not on launch.
- Localised metadata. More indexed surface for modest effort.
- The subtitle. High weight, and it's also read by humans.
- The keyword field. Real, but the smallest lever of the five.
Which is the uncomfortable conclusion of most honest ASO writing: keyword research is worth doing carefully and it is not where the leverage is. Fix your screenshots first.